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Uploading the Avant-Garde

The ﬁrst video on YouTube was uploaded at 8:27 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, 2005. It’s called “Me at the Zoo,” and it features the musings of Jawed Karim, one of the site’s founders, as elephants nose around in hay behind him. The video has a certain pleasing obviousness. “Here we are in front of the, uh, elephants,” Karim says.

“They have really, really, really long” — suspense, but no double entendre — “trunks.” Karim turns to face the elephants as if to confirm his observation. Waits a beat. Readdresses the camera. “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.” The video is 19 seconds long.

When this technique of redundancy was used in the films of Godard, it was considered the height of sophistication, a comment on the way movies pile on information: they show, they narrate and they describe. The elephants are unmistakable to viewers, and yet Karim identifies them. Then he names the iconic shape right in front of us — “long trunks” — lest anyone miss that long trunks equal elephants equal long trunks. This founding clip makes and repeats a larger point, too, with every pixel: Video — trivial or important — can now quickly and at no cost be published, broadcast and shared. “Me at the Zoo” also sets a style standard for the classic YouTube video: visually surprising, narratively opaque, forthrightly poetic.

After the zoo, the deluge. Four and a half years later, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. YouTube, which was acquired by Google in 2006, takes pride in its metrics: “A good way to understand this is if all three major U.S. TV networks (NBC, CBS and ABC) had been broadcasting for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 60 years, they still wouldn’t equal the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in under 60 days,” Chris Dale, a company rep, told me in an e-mail message.

But the content of these innumerable videos is still mystifying. Hit videos by amateurs in the site’s early days tried to produce the recognizable short-form genres that existed on TV: music videos (“Numa Numa”) and sketch comedy (“MySpace: The Movie”). But uploaders since have drifted from known forms, contributing entries now known only as “YouTube videos,” because it’s not clear what they would have been called before the advent of the site.

But what’s surprising is how little the homemade videos resemble the pro goods. Sure, there are parodies of mainstream clips here and there, but mostly the amateurs are off on their own, hatching new genres. Consider “haul” videos, in which people show off the stuff they recently bought, or the popular “fail” videos, which show all manner of efforts gone wrong. Individual haul and fail videos often attract 100,000 views or more — and no one had even imagined such genres until recently. At the same time, no one at any production company seems to be struggling to serve the haul-fail audiences (or combine them?). And the haul people and fail people evidently don’t feel underserved: they are helping themselves and creating what can only be called an art scene, all around the many, many videos of their genre on YouTube.

Photo

Credit
Kevin Van Aelst

In serving these niche audiences with their microgenres, YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde. For years, I have believed this, and for years people have warned (or promised) me that any day now the heterogeneous site would be steamrolled by commercial forces that would wipe out the indigenous flora and fauna. But not only has the weird, small stuff hung around — out of sight of the home page, in many cases — but it also continues to be found by its audience. YouTube may not be making money as efficiently as Google once hoped it would, but it’s still incubating novel forms of creative expression and cultivating new audiences.

This hit me recently when a YouTube video called “Manhattan Bridge Piers” made the rounds on TV and blogs. A beautifully shot, silent time-lapse documentary, it showed the Manhattan Bridge dramatically wobbling when the subway crosses, as if on the verge of collapse. Commenters came at the video from a range of angles. “Amazing video!” one wrote. “Fat New Yorkers!” snapped another. “It’s designed to be flexible. No structure of that size can be made completely rigid,” wrote a third, whose assessment was borne out by professional engineers who commented elsewhere.

In fact, though “Manhattan Bridge Piers” was played on TV for shock value, the video — which was uploaded by a YouTube member named kvertrees, whose work includes other silent films, of mushrooms and swallows — works better as a tribute to suspension technology. And it works best as an art film.

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It recalls nothing so much as “Manhatta,” another silent documentary — from 1921 — by the painter Charles Sheeler and the photographer Paul Strand. With title cards that give quotations from Walt Whitman, “Manhatta” turns the urban landscape into a series of painterly, often abstract vistas. Art museums now show it alongside the still photography and painting of Modernist masters. As in “Manhattan Bridge Piers,” the city seems ominous in “Manhatta,” if only because it so completely overshadows the humans in it.

No wonder some viewers envisioned literal collapse after seeing kvertrees’s film. In “Manhatta,” which emphasizes how the city dwarfs and threatens its inhabitants, a crowd of commuters disembarks from the Staten Island Ferry; they’re jammed so tightly that they seem in danger of suffocating or stampeding. Similarly, there’s virtually no way to see the city in “Manhattan Bridge Piers” except as one secured by fragile pacts.

In both films, the filmmakers align their technology with soaring modern structures and have sought vantages from which to underscore that identification. But the humans in the two movies are mostly out of sight, encased in monstrously beautiful architecture that can be truly beheld — in all its smoking, soaring, swaying, flashing sublimity — only by gods or cameras.

None of kvertrees’s other videos, each powerful in its own way, has received the attention that “Manhattan Bridge Piers” did, largely because news outlets couldn’t peg a discussion of infrastructure disintegration to them. But the others, the mushrooms and the swallows, are worth watching, too. As casual users have puzzled over YouTube — its mayhem and trivia, its commercial and political uses — hard-core users have quietly figured it out. It’s a place for art.

Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations

CAHIERS DU YOUTUBE He even looks a little like Jean-Paul Belmondo. Behold: Jawed Karim in that masterpiece of short film,“Me at the Zoo.” Someone should write a dissertation on it. Free on YouTube.

PROUD AND PASSIONATE CITY It has been called the first avant-garde film in America. Whether you come to it out of love for New York or love for film, “Manhatta” (1921), especially the version meticulously restored by Bruce Posner, is almost overwhelming in its strangeness and beauty. If you can’t see it on a big screen, find samples on the Metropolitan Museum’s site, metmuseum.org, and also on Internet Archive, archive.org.

IN SUSPENSION You’ll be mesmerized — and then you’ll think twice about how you cross the East River: “Manhattan Bridge Piers.” On YouTube, of course.

The Medium will be on hiatus starting next week, as Virginia Heffernan goes on leave. It will return in the winter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM14 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Uploading the Avant-Garde. Today's Paper|Subscribe